Future Food Lab: transforming food realities through design.

A new comer to the Future Food ecosystem has just been launched last week at the IED Innovation lab. The design hub opened its doors for guests from the agro-food sector in Spain, startuppers, makers, and of course the Food Innovation Global Mission delegates who were present in Madrid.

Design: the way to transformation,

As Natcho Martin, the director of IIL explained in his presentation. ,, the ultimate goal of the venue is creating a design playground for transformation projects, summarizng the foreseen activities in Matchmaking, Empowering, Humanizing, and most importantly, providing a safe space for playful learning. The role of design, as Dario Assente, the director of IED Madrid, emphasized has expanded beyond bringing innovation into business, but further towards improving the quality of daily life in all its aspects. At a later presentation our own Elahe Rajabiani explained how the iterative process of design brings feasible, viable and desirable solutions to different kinds of problems.

Ingredients for innovation start from fostering synergies

Then came Sara Roversi’ presentation, where she gave a brief, yet richly detailed background of how the Future Food Institute came to exist, most particularly, the role of educating the young generation to become innovators who can speak the language of the industry, and not only think of new scenarios for change. And thus came the Food Innovation Master program, the Food Innovation Summer School, The kids’ Lab, the young talent academy and the Food Innovation Global mission. The example she gave of an innovative city was Bologna, with its Food traditions, cultural heritage and International position that were mentioned among key ingredients for an innovation ecosystem. Out of the first edition of the Food Innovation Global mission the Future Food Lab in Madrid was born, at the hands of one of the alumni of the food innovation program Beatriz Jacoste.

Who decides what goes into my plate?

With the image of an empty plate in the background, Andra Oprisan, the head of projects at iil, addressed the audience, to make a point that food that finds its way to our plates, and would find its way to people’s plates in the future is the product of the decisions and choices of many different actors. Hence, with all the challenges that limit people’s chances for food security in the future, transforming people’s relationship with food is key to addressing these challenges. To that end a human centered design approach that brings all these actors together, which is the vision of the IED, orchestrating the activities of the different labs (fabrication, cities, extended reality, media, and business) to achieve this transformation at city level.

This is where the Future Food Lab came in as Beatriz Jacoste, the Future Food Lab director, with the guidance of the Seeds of Disruption map, the Future Food Lab will attempt to capture the various nuances around food, by working chiefly with people, as well as community, institutions and companies. The Lab is meant to be a place to experiment, learn and explore the opportunities that technology can offer for changing our relationship with food.

To conclude this amazing event, the Ambassador of Italy to Spain, Mr. Stefano Sannino gave a closing speech, following by signing the agreement for the joint establishment of the lab. To give the audience a taste of what is foreseen to come out of the Future Food Lab, there were short presentations of best practices, including a presentation on sustainable fashion by EcoAlf.

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